G'day Les,

A lagerphone is great fun ... if you notice, after emptying the requisite 150 - 200 beer bottles! There is no limit to what you might attach - the instrument actually harks back to the "Chinese Pavilion", "Turkish Crescent" or "Jingling Johnny" - all the same intrument, a staff covered with brass jingles, often pairs of cresent-shaped pieces that jingled as the staff was swayed back and forth (hence "Turkish Crescent") and often the top was a cascade of succeedingly larger perforated brass cones (which looked like a "Chinese Pavilion").

Theese were played in Eastern country as a rather quiet rhythm accompaniment to dancing, but were adopted by the European 'Military Bands' of the 19th century as a sort of Drum Major's staff with sound effects. They tended to call the instrument a "Jingling Johnny".

I have seen old Australian photographs of makeshift bands with all sorts of things attached to an old broomstick or sapling as a sort of improvised "Jingling Johnny" and I think that the Lagerphone was just the next step in making a useful rhythm instrument from found materials.

The real Australian innovation was not the use of the newly available resource crown seals (available here after ~1905) but the supercharging of the sound possibilities by fitting a bouncy rubber 'crutch tip' to produce a strong primary beat by bouncing, then striking and stroking with a notched hardwood striker to give a secondary and tertiary beat.

The provision af little brass bells and jingles gave the possibility of a fourth level of beat, by flicking the wrist to produce occasional bursts of jingles. The lagerphone can also be decorated with coloured ribbons and boards with band names and/or pictures ... making it somewhere between a drum kit and a regimental flag!

If you are interested, I have written a small pamphlet on traditional bush instruments, as well as a few monographs on aspects of the lagerphone - especially the importance of good design and construction for the striker. If you give me an email address, I can send the appropriate bits as an MS Word file, with illustrations, that you could print out. I know I can't overload the valuable bandwidth of Mudcat for this purpose, but it presents no problem to send it to an individual address.

Regards,

Bob Bolton